Saturday, January 12, 2019

The Holiday Season is over. And this time of year the
upgrade bug can be out in full force. It could be that you got a new laptop,
and want to improve it’s performance. Or it could be that you got some cash
gifts over the holidays, and are looking to bump up the performance of your
current laptop. Either way, RAM and SSD drives are a great way to improve your
performance. And Kingston
with their plethora of products has you covered.

The Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping bug got me. It was
time for a new laptop, and I couldn’t resist the prices. And many of you may be
like me. The new laptops have the newer NVMe slot, as well as the standard hard
drive slot. Budget laptops may only come with 4 GB of RAM, maybe 8GM. They all
come standard with the slow platter hard drives. But if you want to give
yourself a big jump in performance with 16 GB of RAM, a large NVMe SSD primary
drive, and maybe an SSD secondary drive, that is all going to come at a huge
price premium. The Intel 16 GB Optane drive is a popular option to increase the
performance of your platter hard drive, but it’s still a price premium. It’s
much cheaper to do these upgrades yourself after you get the laptop.

This is where Kingston
comes it. There can sometimes be compatibility issues. But Kingston’s website is phenomenal, and makes
finding the right memory modules and drives that will work with your laptop
model easy! You just select the make and model of your laptop, and it will tell
you the correct memory modules, and different SSD drives that will work for
your laptop, including NVMe drives if your laptop has one of those drives. With
Kingston’s
help, you can turn your laptop into a high performance desktop replacement,
especially if your laptop has discrete graphics. Today we will be reviewing Kingston’sKCP426SS8/8 memory modules, A1000 NVMe drive,
and UV500 SSD drive.

I really love these options. 16 GB of RAM will make whatever
task you are working on be really quick. Going with a NVMe primary drive,
windows will load extremely fast! And going with a huge 960 GB drive, it will
be big enough for not only windows, but to hold all of your programs. And they
will load very quickly! Adding a secondary SSD drive, all of your multimedia
flies, such as photos, music, and video, will also load very fast. Being an SSD
drive, it’s also more reliable and safer then an old style platter drive.

For me, going this route was a no brainer. Few laptop
manufacturers offered more than a 256 GB NVMe drive, and if they did, the cost
was huge. Wanting to use the NVMe drive as my primary drive, I wanted much more
than just 256 GB. I also wanted a large secondary drive for my multimedia
files, and the size that I wanted was again a huge premium. The same was also true
going from 8 GB to 16 GB of RAM. It was so much cheaper to do these upgrades
myself. And seeing the price difference between say the 480 GB and 960 GB SSD
drive, it was worth paying a little more and getting twice the storage
capacity!

I was also a bit intrigued with the performance potential.
The laptop deal I found came with the 16 GB Intel Optane drive. I thought I
would still get a boost in performance, but I wasn’t sure how much. I knew it
would be more reliable, but I wasn’t sure how much faster it would be. But
having the platter 7200 RMP hard drive as well as the Intel Optane drive, I can
show you what to expect. I’ll run numbers with 8 GB and just with the platter
hard drive, and then what the numbers are with the Optane drive installed. Then
I’ll run numbers with 16GB RAM installed and the new A1000 NVMe drive and UV500
SSD drive installed.

Features and specs:

Kinston KCP426SS8/8 Memory:

SKU

KCP426SS8/8

EAN/UPC Code

740617281897

Memory Capacity

8GB

Model/Series/Type

KCP

Brand

Kingston

CASLatency

CL17

Chip Organization

x8

Data Width

X64

Form Factor

DDR4

Memory Depth

2G

Memory Voltage

1.2v

Module Type

SODIMM

Operating Temperature

0°C to 85°C

Pins

260 Pin

Product Type/Family

DRAM

RAM Memory Type

Non-ECC

Rank

1R (Single Rank)

Speed

2666MHz (PC4-21300)

Warranty

Lifetime

A1000:

Form
Factor: M.2 2280

Interface:
PCIe NVMe™ Gen 3.0 x 2 Lanes

Capacities2: 240GB, 480GB, 960GB

Controller: Phison
E8

NAND: 3D TLC

Sequential
Read/Write1:
240GB — up to 1,500/800MB/s
480GB — up to 1,500/900MB/s
960GB — up to 1,500/1,000MB/s

Random
4K Read/Write1:
240GB — up to 100,000/80,000

IOPS
480GB — up to 100,000/90,000 IOPS
960GB — up to 120,000/100,000 IOPS

The two 8 GB RAM modules came in a simple molded plastic
holder with a clear plastic cover. The A1000 NVMe SSD Drive also came in a
similar holder. Both came with the small manual, and the A1000 NVMe drive also
came with a software key. The UV500 SSD drive
came in a nice upgrade kit with a color printed box with photos and specs of
the drive. Opening the box revealed a well protected drive held in a cardboard
holder. Also included was an external case, a desktop drive bay mount, and
power and data cables. Owners manual and product key was also included. The
memory modules as well as the A1000 NVMe and UV500 SSD drives were all
extremely well made.

Installation was very simple. Once the bottom cover of my
laptop was off, it was easy to install the new memory modules, A1000 NVMe drive
and UV500 SSD drives. The memory modules were spring loaded. Pulling out on the
metal holder released it and it popped up. I just pulled out the stock module,
slid in both of the new modules, pressed them down and they locked into place.
For the A1000 NVMe drive, one end was held in the socket, and the other end was
held in place by a small screw. Uninstalling the Intel Optane drive was as simple
as taking out the screw which popped up the Optane drive, and then just pulling
it out of the socket. Installing the new A1000 NVMe drive was done in reverse
order.

One of the great things about both the A1000 NVMe drive as
well as the UV500 SSD drive, is
the inclusion of the product key, which is for an OEM version of the Acronis True
Image software. The software allows you to make a backup copy of your hard
drive, as well as make a clone copy of your hard drive. Being able to make a
clone copy is what had me really excited. Thanks to the software, it made
upgrading hard drives very easy. With the new A1000 NVMe drive installed, I
downloaded and installed the software, made a clone copy of my hard drive and
had it loaded onto my new A1000 NVMe drive.

It was now time to test. Windows seemed to load ok with the
clone version loaded on the new hard drive. Disconnecting my slow platter drive
and restarting windows confirmed that the clone copy took perfectly. Now I was
able to install the UV500 SSD drive as my secondary drive, in the spot my
platter drive was in. After restarting windows and seeing the UV500 SSD drive
was installed, it was time to shut down, screw down the back panel, and run
some numbers. Now let’s see how it all performs!

I read good things of the Intel Optane drive, and it did
impress. I was able to get windows to load very fast! As expected, using just
the 7200 RPM platter drive: well..... it crawled. I was pleased to see the
Kingston A1000 NVMe drive performed even better than the Intel Optane drive.
Windows didn’t load a whole lot faster, but it was faster. And you can see from
the numbers that the Kingston
drive was up to 50% faster than the Optane drive. And when you compare the Kingston drive to the
platter hard drive; well, it’s painful.

If you can do your own upgrades, that’s where you get the
most bang for the buck. My laptop was a Walmart Black Friday online special.
Looking at HP’s website, if I were to configure it myself with what I wanted,
going from the Optane drive to a 256 GB NVMe drive was a $180 upgrade. And
there was no option to change the platter drive to an SSD drive. Kingston’s 240 GB NVMe
drive is only $60. But the 960 GB version is only $220. Going from 8 GB of RAM
to 16 GB through HP was $160, while 2 sticks of 8 GB through Kingston is only $75 each. And the Kingston
UV500 SSD drive upgrade kit was only $215.00.

If you want the best performance for your laptop, you will
want to upgrade to more RAM, to the faster NVMe drive, and SSD secondary drive.
You get a bigger bang for your buck doing the upgrades yourself. And Kingston has you covered
with their A1000 NVMe drive, UV500 SSD drive and their memory modules. Based on
their design, features, quality and performance they have earned our Editor’s
Choice Award. For more info and complete specs check out their website at
www.kingston.com.